The goals of the Highly Parallel Computer System project are to provide a parallel computer facility that will benefit the NIH staff in their scientific computing needs and to develop expertise in the methods of parallel processing. This system will perform computationally intensive tasks that are encountered in biomedical computing in much less time than conventional machines and allow the DCRT staff to master the techniques of parallel processing which DCRT believes is an emerging computing discipline that will have significant application in biomedicine. Initial application areas that are being investigated for this new system include: (1)Computational Chemistry (2)Protein and Nucleic Acid Sequence Analysis (3)Biomedical Image Processing (4)Biomedical Signal Processing (5)General Scientific Computing During the past year, DCRT entered into an interagency agreement with the Information Science and Technology Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in order to participate in their High Performance Computing effort. In this collaboration, DARPA provided NIH with a Touchstone prototype parallel computer system that was developed under contract to Intel Scientific Computers. In the coming years, DCRT will use the prototype to develop advanced computing methods for selected biomedical research projects. Participation in the Touchstone project will enable DCRT to remain at the forefront of national research initiatives in parallel computing.